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Friday, May 29, 2009

Today we've performed a release of BibSonomy, containing some new interesting features you might find helpful! The first one addresses the common problem of finding other BibSonomy users with similar interests as oneself; they might be a great source for interesting content like recent publications or up-to-date bookmarks. On your personal user page (i.e. in the "MyBibSonomy" area), you'll find in the sidebar a new list with "similar users":We've computed these using several similarity measures - when you click on "more", you can check which one is best for you. When you click on one of the user names, you'll be directed to a personalized page which looks like this:The main idea behind this personalization is to help you finding the interesting content of this user for you; we're comuting a personalized ranking which sorts this user's posts according to your interests. The tag cloud shows this user's tags, which are probably interesting for you.

This personalization feature is also available when you browse in the "usual way" on a user page - there we provide a "personalize"-Link at the top:Besides that, this release contains a number of small fixes & improvements - if you happen to encounter any irregularity, we'd be happy to hear from you so that we can fix the problem. Besides that - feel invited to play around with our new features and get the most out of BibSonomy!

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Typo3 is a popular open-source content management system, used by a large number of private and corporate websites. It offfers among others a generic extension architecture, which enables developers to add custom functionality to Typo3-based websites.

For many websites in academic contexts (e.g. personal homepages of researchers, universities, research projects, ...), an important building block is an up-to-date publication list. Maintaining these lists manually is a tedious task; in order to ease this process, we have developed a versatile BibSonomy Typo3 Extension! The core concept is to keep all references cleanly stored inside BibSonomy (leveraging all useful BibSonomy features like import from different formats, scraping services, ...) and to generate automatically a publication list from this data. Have a look here what it can look like:

Configure the plugin (e.g. select which entries to display, select the layout, ...)

You're done! :)

For each of these steps we have written an extensive online documentation. Our plugin is already part of the official Typo3 installation of the University of Kassel! We offer a number of predefined standard layouts (Harvard, DIN1505...) for formatting the publication lists; in addition, it is possible to use customized layouts based on a JabRef Layout Filter.

Apart from publication lists, the plugin is also able to display tag clouds which can be embedded into websites to visualize e.g. research interests of a group or an individual. We hope that this plugin is another step towards making BibSonomy more useful for you in the process of managing bibliographic data in an integrated and unified way. The BibSonomy team is of course also open to comments and suggestions!